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Dumbass of the Week: Site Scrapers

Sitting in the big chair marked Dumbass this week is an annoying little SEO outfit from Manchester called Web Propeller.

I ranted yesterday about how they were evil site scraping bastards because they basically steal the content from this blog within an hour of me posting it. I’m not the only one they steal from. They scrape Marty’s content too, as well as Niall Kennedy’s blog and others, listing us all as “contributors” on their blog home page. What’s up with that? As someone commented on my post yesterday, perhaps they should change that title to “unwilling, unwitting contributors”.

Well as luck would have it, they scraped my post from yesterday. So now they are proudly announcing on their own site what evil site scraping bastards they really are. And the kicker? They’ve tagged the post under the category seo problems. Bwa ha haaaaa!

And just in case somebody from Web Propeller notices their stupidity and deletes the post from their site (perhaps while on a break from stealing other people’s content), I’ve posted a screen shot:

Some days, I really love my job. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if they scraped this post too?

I think it’s time they changed their catch phrase from “making you rank better” to “making you rank better for your own stupidity”.

UPDATE 3: The penny has dropped. According to a public apology by the scraper himself, Web Propeller is a fictional company and the domain is owned by a company called Creative Suit.

The site scraping was apparently nothing more than an unauthorized experiment by a naughty junior staff member. His boss is plenty mad about it and is asking for suitable punishment suggestions. I was going to suggest they make him use this picture as his screen saver, but figured that was too cruel.

Apology accepted! Maybe site scrapers will think twice now before doing this to anyone else.

About Kalena Jordan

In my day job, I'm Director of Studies and tutor at the online training institution Search Engine College. In my spare time, I'm a search engine agony aunt and SEO to global clients. I've been marketing websites online since 1996 and blogging about search since 2002. To learn more, visit My Google+ Profile

….eh…..I can’t believe them scumbags have nicked my home page text for their home page!! (actually this gets funnier!) – I live just up the road so I am going to phone them first thing in the morning and let them f*cking have it! http://www.hobo-web.co.uk – look familiar? God the world’s a small place! What were the chances…..time for a serp annihilation with Tim Nash again (and you this time)!

Posted on my own blog last week about seo firms making promises that are shady and now I read this – we as a community need to continue to “out” these idiots. It is our responsibility to weed them out and have the community then take action. Too much already going on and I applaud your work here.

Great way to out the scrapers Kalena, and it’s good to see that you got an apology from them over on the Sphinn comments for this. I wonder if the magic will extend far enough to stop the guy at spiderspro [dot] com (don’t want to give him a link – scraping bastard) who’s started nicking my stuff along with a bunch of other people’s blogs. My site’s only been up for a week and I’m already getting ripped. Don’t know whether to be proud or pissed off. Think I’ll borrow the idea from you and out up a post about him and see if he scrapes that.

[…] even if it was just from some crappy PR0 splog. Then today I saw a story on Sphinn that lead me to Ask-Kalena’s post about her problem with “Evil Site Scraping Bastards” doing exactly the same thing to her blog. Of course, with her readership and level of respect in […]

[…] Dumbass of the Week: Web Propeller “Well as luck would have it, they scraped my post from yesterday. So now they are proudly announcing on their own site what evil site scraping bastards they really are. And the kicker? They’ve tagged the post under the category seo problems. Bwa ha haaaaa!” […]

[…] from the site in your analytics. I’ve ranted about site scrapers before and even managed to get my own back on occasion, but short of sending site scrapers a *cease and desist* email, there’s not much […]